Turn off hard disks after...

[Charlie98]

W7 and power savings settings...

Although I have this disabled on my primary PC, I'm wondering about how it works on something like my HTPC, which has an SSD for the OS, and 3 storage HDDs... only one of which would be spinning at any one time. Am I correct in guessing that as long as a drive is active (reading or writing) it wouldn't go to sleep? Or is it an 'all or nothing' for all the drives?

I don't really see any reason to have all 3 drives spinning if they aren't being used, I just don't want poor playback performance.

 

[bigboxes]

W7 and power savings settings...

Although I have this disabled on my primary PC, I'm wondering about how it works on something like my HTPC, which has an SSD for the OS, and 3 storage HDDs... only one of which would be spinning at any one time. Am I correct in guessing that as long as a drive is active (reading or writing) it wouldn't go to sleep? Or is it an 'all or nothing' for all the drives?

I don't really see any reason to have all 3 drives spinning if they aren't being used, I just don't want poor playback performance.

These are "Turn off..." after idle. If you are using your HTPC then it's not idle. If any of the settings changes that then you would need to adjust those settings, either in Windows or in whatever software you are using your HTPC for.

 

[VirtualLarry]

As far as I know, the timers are per-drive, but the setting is global to all drives. So if the OS drive is constantly accessed, but the storage drives aren't, then the storage drives will get spun down individually after 10 minutes of inactivity (per the setting), while the OS drive will stay "awake".

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

http://www.coolerguys.com/840556094616.html?productid=840556094616&channelid=FROOG

 

[Charlie98]

http://www.coolerguys.com/840556094616.html?productid=840556094616&channelid=FROOG

Interesting, but no. I don't really want to spend $70 on hardware when software should be able to handle it. In the end, I don't really care if the drives spin or not, but if I can save some wear and tear on them, that's all the better.

 

[Ranulf]

Win7 is set to spin down my 3TB storage drive if its not being accessed. Which is nice because this particular seagate is rather noisy despite being in a fractal case with noise dampeners.

Downside is that for some programs that access that drive, you will have a stall/slow load of a few seconds as windows spins the drive back up.

 

[Jovec]

In the end, I don't really care if the drives spin or not, but if I can save some wear and tear on them, that's all the better.

There is a line of thinking that says the majority of wear and tear comes from the spinning up of the hard drives, so it's best to never have them power down. FWIW, I've been power down my multiple 5-7yo WD Green HTPC drives at 30 minutes since I installed them.

 

[bononos]

http://www.coolerguys.com/840556094616.html?productid=840556094616&channelid=FROOG

Got to remember to run the umount command before flipping the switch on one of those things.

W7 and power savings settings...
Although I have this disabled on my primary PC, I'm wondering about how it works on something like my HTPC, which has an SSD for the OS, and 3 storage HDDs... only one of which would be spinning at any one time. Am I correct in guessing that as long as a drive is active (reading or writing) it wouldn't go to sleep? Or is it an 'all or nothing' for all the drives?
........

WD greens will park heads after every 7-30s and spin down unless you change the head parking parameter. Its independent of the power saving settings of windows I think.

 

[Charlie98]

WD greens will park heads after every 7-30s and spin down unless you change the head parking parameter. Its independent of the power saving settings of windows I think.

I don't have any Greens in my HTPC, I do have a Red, though; I don't think the Red has that aggressive a head park curve.

There is a line of thinking that says the majority of wear and tear comes from the spinning up of the hard drives

There was a thread on here some time ago about that, I think modern tech has addressed the issue of reliability, re: spinning up vs 100% run.

In the case of my HTPC, only one drive is used to stream movies from storage, the other 2 are backup drives only and don't do anything (except the occasional loading of newly ripped movies.)